[Some time ago, I asked readers for recommended reading on their branches of Christianity. Below is my understanding of the Calvinist system, as gathered from R. C. Sproul’s “What is Reformed Theology?”, one of the books recommended to me. Hopefully, this will be the first in a series as I work my way down my reading list. Protestant commenters should be considered to have more authority than me on this topic, and I will gratefully take their correction. The goal of this post, and I hope of the subsequent discussion, will be to accurately describe the Reformed faith, rather than to criticize or defend it (except against definite misunderstandings, of which there are unfortunately many).]

Sproul’s book attempts to explain the distinctive tenets of Reformed theology. It highlights differences with other Christians while avoiding a polemical tone. (Sproul tries hard to be fair to Catholicism. More often, he contrasts his classical Protestant positions with those of the Arminians; only they could say how fairly he characterizes them.) This is just right for our purposes.

Michael Shermer at Reasonwrites that mankind is being uplifted by a “moral Flynn effect”–not only are we much smarter than our ancestors; we are also much more moral, and the smarter among us are the most moral of all. Of course, one’s opinion of this thesis will depend on whether one agrees or disagrees with the moral novelties of recent decades. I’ll leave the critique of the writer’s biases and unwarranted assumptions to readers who feel they’re not getting enough practice at that sort of thing, limiting myself to a quibble over language. I would say that the trend he describes is not so much men becoming more moral as men becoming more docile. The very intelligent, I am willing to concede, are a very docile bunch, inclined neither to violent crime nor to questioning the reigning liberal dogmas, these being Shermer’s two measures of moral advance. Docility is usually a good thing–heaven forbid I speak disparagingly of it!–but it is not quite the same thing as morality, a potentially wilder attribute.

What I’d really like to talk about is an interesting claim that comes up in the essay. Shermer proposes an explanation for the connection between intelligence and morality: intelligence helps us understand the perspective of others, which makes us treat them better. Thus, the more intelligent of us have broader sympathies, and as the Flynn effect raises the general IQ, society as a whole becomes more compassionate and just. Here we have an empirical claim that can stand apart from the ethical commitments of the writer. One might even make this claim while remaining ambivalent on the moral value of perspective-shifting. Traditionally, justice was seen as the “view from nowhere”; just sampling the different perspectives couldn’t reveal which one is right. Compassion can be misdirected. Failure to punish can be a defect of justice. The more sympathetic party is not always the one in the right.

In fact, I doubt we are getting better at perspective-shifting. My observations all go the other way. It seems to me that modern men are uniquely lacking in the ability to assume other peoples’ perspectives, and in fact that they have gotten noticeably worse at it over the course of my own lifetime.

Reason, which revolts against the transmission of sin or of penalty, yet receives what is transmitted to us without repugnance, notwithstanding the sorrow which accompanies it, if in place of being designated as sin and penalty it is called inevitable misfortune. It is not, however, difficult clearly to prove that this misfortune could not be changed into happiness, except with the condition of its being a penalty, from which we necessarily conclude that the rationalistic solution in its definitive results is less acceptable than the Catholic solution.

If our actual depravity is only a physical and necessary effect of the primitive corruption, and the effect must last so long as the cause remains, it is evident that since there is no means whatever of removing the cause, neither can there be any by which the effect may be prevented.

…For it is worthy of remark, and in opposition to what at first sight would appear, that it is not justice but mercy which is especially conspicuous in that solemn condemnation which immediately followed the commission of sin. If God had refrained from intervening with this condemnation when this tremendous catastrophe occurred, if when He saw man separated from Him He had withdrawn Himself from man, and entering into the tranquility of His repose had no longer vouchsafed to think of man, or, to express all in one word, if God in place of condemning man had abandoned him to the inevitable consequences of his voluntary disunion and separation, then the fall of man would have been hopeless, and his perdition certain. But in order that this disaster might be repaired, it became necessary for God to draw near to man in another way, uniting Himself to him anew, though imperfectly, by the ties of mercy. Punishment was the new bond of union between the Creator and the creature, and in it mercy and justice were mysteriously joined, mercy being the connecting link, and justice vindicated in the penalty assigned.

If we cease to view suffering and sorrow in the light of a penalty, we not only deprive them of their power to reunite the Creator and the creature, but we also destroy their expiatory and purifying effect on man. If grief is not a penalty, it is an unmitigated evil; if it is a penalty, it still remains an evil through its origin, sin; but it is also a great good, on account of its freeing from the defilement of sin. The universality of sin renders necessary the universality of purification, in order that all mankind may be cleansed in its mysterious waters.

…Regard the Earth throughout its length and breadth, consider all that surrounds you, annihilate space and time, and you will find among the abodes of men only what you here behold–a grief without intermission, and a lamentation which never ceases. But this grief freely accepted is the measure of all greatness; for there can be no greatness without sacrifice, and sacrifice is only grief voluntarily accepted. The world calls those persons heroic who, transpierced with a sword of grief, freely accept their suffering. The Church calls holy those who accept every grief, both the the spirit and of the flesh…

Mankind has unanimously recognized a sanctifying virtue in grief. This is why, though the ages, in every zone, man has rendered homage and worship to great misfortune. Oedipus is greater in the day of his calamity than in the days of his glory…

The following are reflections based on my years teaching introductory astronomy for non-science majors. Few of my students take the class out of personal interest. It fulfills a natural sciences general education requirement and sounds less scary than geology or chemistry. Thus, the ultimate purpose of the class is to expose students to the scientific enterprise, so I put a lot of thought into the impression of science I’m giving them. When I speak of “science” below, I will be using the word in its modern rather than its classical sense, according to which biology and sociology are sciences while philosophy and history are not.

Survey course textbooks in the branches of science usually include some discussion of the general nature of science. Anxious to emphasize science’s quality as a process rather than a fixed body of knowledge, they often hold up the “scientific method” as the essence of science. This, however, has disadvantages. For one, actual science rarely follows the model given in these books. More importantly, the scientific method is itself given no real justification, and the limits of its usefulness are left unclear. What makes this problem pressing is that students may believe, and textbooks may even state, that the scientific method involves assumptions about the world and excludes a priori certain kinds of explanation, as for instance when scientific explanations are contrasted with assertions of miraculous or animistic spiritual causality. The impression is given that science is at least methodologically naturalist, that when thinking scientifically we must pretend to be atheists. This, I emphasize, is not a problem for religion; it’s a problem for science. To tie oneself from the beginning to very questionable metaphysical assumptions threatens the credibility of the whole enterprise.

Half of the families in my apartment building are Muslims. I don’t interact with them much, but occasionally we run into each other. I remember the night in 2012 when President Obama accepted his nomination as the Democratic candidate for president. Ordinarily, I try to stay clear of all that political partisan stuff, but I was out for a walk, and one of the Muslim men decided to play Obama’s acceptance speech on his car radio loud enough for the rest of us to hear. Obama was going on about a sinister cabal of rich men who are scheming to decide “whether you can have birth control” and “who you can marry”, etc, with Obama assuring us that he’s going to fight these miscreants. And there’s this Muslim guy with his long beard and funny non-Western clothes grinning and nodding along. Our eyes met, and he smiled, and went on listening.

Here’s the funny thing. I haven’t talked to them, but the other American family in the apartment building has, and they’ve learned some things about our Muslim neighbors. These guys are from Saudi Arabia. The guy’s wife goes around completely covered except for her eyes, and she’s actually not supposed to be out at all if men might be present. And there they are, seemingly as happy as can be with the Democrats’ feminist jihad, as if there’s no tension there. I know this would make a better story if I would have gone up and asked him if it didn’t make him a little bit uncomfortable that the President was advocating contraception and sodomy, but I don’t know him, and I didn’t want to start an argument. I suppose it’s possible that he was laughing to himself about what a bunch of degenerates Americans are, but I can’t help suspecting that he was just nodding with approval at the thought that his candidate was going to stick it to those white Christians. Consistently applied principles are for suckers. What one thinks of Muslims in America depends a lot on how one reads those grins.

Let me tell you how I think about Muslims in the West. They’re liberals, married for life to the Left, just like Jews and American blacks. Individuals among these groups might make common cause with us, and such are welcome, but their identities are too tied with the sense of opposition to Christian Europe for us to expect more than that. Terrorism is a nuisance, much less dangerous to our civilization than blasphemy. In the end, Muslims will only matter as communist voters.

Why does God allow evil? You are asking for a reason for evil, but evil is by definition that which has no reason. It is the absence of what should be there. God cannot have a reason for it. It cannot be good that evil be. It cannot be that good relies in any necessary way on evil. That would mean that good isn’t entirely good and can’t be self-subsistent; it means that God, Who is Subsistent Goodness, doesn’t exist. If you think you have thought of a good reason for God to put sin in the world, repent and put such wicked thoughts aside. It is not better that Satan fell and Adam sinned.

A perfect language should be spare and clear. Ambiguity and obfuscation should be made impossible or at least very difficult. It should dissipate word game-induced confusion and allow reasoning in a straightforward, almost mechanical, way.

A perfect language should be expansive and evocative. It should provide the resources to capture every experience and intuition, every shade of meaning. Far better to allow the possibility of confusion than to linguistically cut oneself off from a genuine aspect of the world and the human condition.

Analytic and Continental philosophy are divided by adherence to the different visions. Do we dissolve philosophical puzzles by linguistic therapy, like Wittgenstein? Does this mean removing pseudo-problems or just taking away the tools for expressing real problems? Or do we, like Hegel, seek a grand synthesis in which every conflicting intuition can find its home? This also has dangers, because attempts to “eff the ineffable” (as Roger Scruton once put it) often fall back on vagueness, and it really is possible to lose oneself in a fog of metaphors.

Liberalism is an attempt at a spare political language, one that cuts through problems by eliminating words and the ideas that go with them. Politics is indeed simplified when one is not allowed to talk about anything other than equal preference satisfaction. Justice becomes for Rawls a constrained maximization problem, no different than the ones engineers solve all the time. There is the price that one may only have arbitrary, private preferences, but liberalism disallows the language one would need to criticize this, making it an elegantly closed system. Russell Kirk’s conservatism of prudence, on the other hand, may do a good job of evoking certain political virtues misplaced by the modern world, but it is too vague to be used as an impartial analytic tool. (For example, has any traditionalist ever given a criterion, one that could be applied by any third party to give the same result, as to when a proposed reform is prudent vs. a utopian effort to build heaven on earth?) It’s application is next to arbitrary.

Scholasticism attempts a compromise practice between the two schools of modern philosophy: openness to the whole of reality–even though it means dealing in subtleties–while demanding the sort of clarity needed for the laws of logic to operate. It attempts to do this by making very fine distinctions, even at the risk of being cumbersome. In theology, the students of Aquinas and Scotus–and, for that matter, Calvin–have an austerity to them, a refusal to be carried along by pious sentiment past where their “data” will go, that I find beautiful. They strike me as being men of firmer faith than their more extravagant contemporaries, because they act like they care about what is actually true. Did Balthasar really believe that Christ descended into an otherwise-empty hell, or was it just for him a good story that expressed his own religious enthusiasm? The ratio of real evidence gathering and reasoning to opaque verbiage does not inspire confidence.

One might say that we at the Orthosphere are attempting to practice a scholastic politics.

Universalism, we’ve seen, goes way back. The ideas of universal brotherhood, a universal natural law, and even of a single ultimate God were known to the pagans. Far from a sign of spiritual advance, the separation of God from one’s people and social order has often marked spiritual decline. In Voegelin’s terminology, the compactness of the world, the sense that local rituals and duties connect to ultimate reality, is lost. The world’s Axial Age, and Israel’s Prophetic Age, were the time when people started to intuit God’s transcendence but didn’t know how to handle it. They could no longer see God’s presence in the ancient theocracies and vaguely imagined Messianic kingdoms in which this tension could be overcome. In the moral order, the question was how one could justify particularity in light of this new universalistic perspective. Having mentally “risen above” the tribe, how does one get back down?

Christianity did not create this problem. Christianity is one proposed solution, the most adequate on offer, in my opinion.

What is the other solution? Imagine the predicament of man who loves his tribe or country but has come to accept that this love, loyalty, and piety are rationally and morally indefensible. His highest moral principles condemn his noblest sentiments. In fact, you don’t have to imagine this–you’re living it–but I’ll get back to that. How can he live with such a spiritual wound? The problem, as he misconstrues it, is this: how, from a universal perspective (shedding, as he imagines he must, his own “empirical ego”) can it be justified to favor this group in particular?

The group must be special in some absolute, objective sense. The only quality that really matters is morality, and the heart of morality (as he understands it) is universalism. And here is the solution! His group is the one to have discovered universalism. That doesn’t, of course, mean that they own it, that they can hoard this treasure for themselves. Quite the opposite! They have a duty to spread their light to those still in darkness. This is, indeed, the very essence and reason-for-being of the group: to spread universalism. A group dedicated to the abolition of groups. A universal, a propositional people. So our man lays down his natural loyalty, and in return he is allowed to pick up a new unnatural loyalty. His new love, for an idea rather than a concrete people, is a cold and inhuman thing compared to the love he left behind, but it is the only thing his cold and inhuman morality of universal brotherhood will allow him, so he makes due with it.

“Now you dwellers in Jerusalem and people of Judah,judge between me and my vineyard. What more could have been done for my vineyardthan I have done for it? When I looked for good grapes,why did it yield only bad? Now I will tell youwhat I am going to do to my vineyard: I will take away its hedge,and it will be destroyed; I will break down its wall,and it will be trampled. I will make it a wasteland,neither pruned nor cultivated,and briers and thorns will grow there. I will command the cloudsnot to rain on it.”

Today begins the Extraordinary Synod on the Family, the official beginning of what promises to be a two year campaign to destroy what little of the Catholic Church has managed to survive thus far the dark and terrible springtime of Vatican II. Nothing that lay Catholics can do will influence the outcome of this process, even if that outcome hasn’t been rigged from the beginning (and the quite striking omissions in Instrumentum Laboris do nothing to allay my worries on this). Nevertheless, I’m sure I’m not the only one feeling a strange urgency to say something. I keep thinking that years from now I’m going to look back on this time, and that it will be some comfort to know that when the Gospel was under assault from the hierarchy itself, I didn’t fail to…I’m not sure what exactly. So I’ll do what I always do: remind people of the stakes.

This is part 4 of a 6 part series. (Yes, the planned length has increased.)

Among those who accuse Christianity of universalism, much is made of its Great Commission to spread the faith and convert all peoples. (I will make no distinction below between “proselytizing” and “evangelizing” because there isn’t any. Since this is a historical-theological study, I will also ignore the current Bishop of Rome’s emphatic rejection of the Savior’s command, which, assuming he has the authority to do such a thing, presumably satisfies anyone concerned with Rome’s universalism.) Undeniably, a conversion of the whole world to Christianity would mean the end of a certain kind of diversity. However, proselytism is not unique to Christianity or monotheism. Every person has some idea of truths that it is important for everyone else to know, meaning naturally that as great a unanimity in favor of such truths should be achieved as possible. Which beliefs should inspire evangelical fervor can be surprising, at least to me. I can understand the practical reason why the believers of anthropogenic global warming should think it important that others believe as they do, but I cannot fathom why evolution by natural selection should be such an aggressively proselytizing faith, while no one feels the same zeal to eliminate unbelief in Kirchhoff’s circuit laws or the theory of plate tectonics.

However, this doesn’t make AGW or Darwinism universalist faiths, in that they don’t necessarily undermine loyalty to non-universal groups. They may accidentally undermine a group if it has a contradictory ideological component, but particular group identity and loyalty is not ruled out in principle. To be a Darwinist doesn’t necessarily mean one is allowed loyalty only to “mankind” or a universal Darwinist Church. That is, AGW and Darwinism are proselytizing but not homogenizing faiths.

Liberalism is an interesting case, with its claim to represent ideological neutrality, and thus be acceptable to peoples of all different beliefs and loyalties. As we have often argued, this neutrality claim is a sham. To reduce religions and communal identities to private hobbies allowed no influence on public life is to destroy them. Liberalism’s demands for freedom, tolerance, and inclusiveness, which ultimately mean the delegitimation of anything other than itself, make it the ultimate homogenizing faith.